Ecology Law Currents

Student Review of Selected Panels at the 2012 Water Law Symposium "Water and Growth: The Imperative for Sustainable Approaches to Uncertainty"

[ Click Here to Comment ]
[ download PDF ]

 

Click here for videos of all sessions or on each session for its video.

All review authors attended the 2012 Water Law Symposium hosted at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law on January 21, 2012. The panel reviews are based on their own observations and reflections. No citations should be attributed directly to the panelists themselves.

Aviation and Emissions Trading in the European Union: Pie in the Sky or Compatible with International Law?

Stephanie Switzer*

[ Click Here to Comment ]
[ download PDF ]

In 2003, the then European Community[1] adopted Directive 2003/87/EC, establishing a scheme for trading allowances of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.[2] Directive 2003/87/EC mandated the establishment of an emissions trading scheme (ETS) within the European Community “to promote reductions of greenhouse gas emissions in a cost-effective and economically efficient manner.”[3] The preamble to Directive 2003/87/EC states that the establishment of such a scheme would contribute to the achievement of the European Community’s and its Member States’ commitments under the Kyoto Protocol.[4] In this regard, the Protocol is a mechanism enacted by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change[5] to promote reductions in emissions associated with climate change. The Protocol entered into force in 2005 and requires participating Annex 1 countries—in effect, developed countries—to reduce certain GHG emissions by 2012 to at least 5 percent below 1990 levels.[6] The European Union pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions listed in Annex A of the Kyoto Protocol to 8 percent below 1990 levels in the period 2008 to 2012.[7]

Photo credit to shyb.

Because of the European Union’s emissions reduction pledge, the ETS is considered “a cornerstone of European policy on climate change”[8] and is the world’s largest such scheme.[9] The ETS did not initially include emissions from aviation activities; however the omission of aviation activities from the ETS eventually came to an end on January 1, 2012 when Directive 2008/101/EC, which amended Directive 2003/87/EC,[10] entered into force.[11].The extension of the ETS to aviation emissions requires aviation operators to surrender emission allowances equivalent to the total number of emissions produced the preceding year, and applies penalties to operators who do not comply with this obligation.[12] Initially, 85 percent of emission allowances will be distributed freely with the remaining 15 percent auctioned, with a reserve fund of allowances being made available to new market entrants.[13]

7th Annual EJ Symposium — Hungry for Justice: Growing an Equitable Food System

[ Clck Here to Comment ]

 

Lessons Already Learned: An Analysis of Waxman-Markey under Current WTO Case Law

Gregory E. Wannier*

[ Clck Here to Comment ]
[ download PDF ]

Introduction

In 2009, the House of Representatives, responding to rising concerns over anthropogenic contributions to climate change, passed the first major piece of climate legislation in U.S. history.[1] This bill, the “American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009” (ACESA), would cap U.S. carbon emissions and establish a national carbon market where regulated parties trade carbon dioxide emissions rights.[2] However, because many in the developed world fear that carbon markets will hurt domestic industries and lead to job losses and “leakage” of carbon emissions to less-regulated markets in the developing world,[3] ACESA imposes severe quality controls on the importation of energy-intensive manufactured goods that face the highest prospective carbon reduction costs.[4] This provision could dramatically affect trade, and thus could be challenged under the World Trade Organization (WTO), an intriguing possibility given the WTO’s controversial status in the trade community.[5]

 
International shipping containers at the Port of Oakland, Oakland, California.  Photo courtesy of Nell Green Nylen.
 

This Article takes ACESA through a theoretical WTO review, ultimately finding that ACESA would probably pass WTO review with some modifications. WTO consideration of ACESA could serve as an indication of how future unilateral action can be effectively and legally taken. However, the lesson from this analysis goes further; WTO retains the ability to overturn environmental protections, and its decisions are respected (if not always appreciated or adhered to) by the international community. As countries negotiate a balance between economic fears in the developed world and economic growth in the developing world, they may find that norms established and enforced by the WTO provide useful insights.

Student Review of Selected Panels at the Berkeley Law 2010 Environmental Justice Symposium

Kara Cook, Maria Stamas, and Meredith Wilensky*

[ Clck Here to Comment ]
[ download PDF ]

  

The Role of the Environmental Justice Lawyer

PANELISTS:

Kara Brodfehrer, Attorney, California Rural Legal Assistance, Inc.;
Alegria De La Cruz, Directing Attorney, Center on Race, Poverty, and the Environment;
Helen Kang, Director, Golden Gate University, Environmental Law and Justice Clinic;
Phoebe Seaton, Attorney, California Rural Legal Assistance, Inc.

The forum discussion on February 16, entitled “The Environmental Justice Movement: History & Skills Every Lawyer Should Know,” was a great kick off to the Sixth Annual Environmental Justice Symposium. For aspiring lawyers with very little experience or background in Environmental Justice (EJ) this introductory forum was the perfect place to learn more about the movement. The forum explored the EJ attorney’s role as an advocate.

Spreading the Water Wealth: Making Water Infrastructure Work for the Poor*

Patrick McCully and Lori Pottinger **

[ jump to end/comments ]
[ download PDF ]

Want of clean water, decent sanitation, and adequate food and energy strips people of their dignity and their most basic rights. Inequitable access to water, especially for growing crops, is a major factor in global poverty and a death sentence for millions each year.

According to the World Bank, “[t]he ‘easy and cheap’ options for mobilizing water resources for human needs have mostly been exploited.”[1] If the World Bank were right, this would be a depressing message for the 1.1 billion people without easy access to safe water.[2] The good news is, the Bank is wrong. Many technologically easy and relatively cheap options for water provision exist that can help lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, end widespread hunger, and reduce the daily workload of women and children. The bad news is that the World Bank-led large-dam lobby is aggressively supporting a resurgence in water mega-projects.[3]

China's Environment After the Olympics

Lo Sze Ping *

[ jump to end/comments ]
[ download PDF ]

I. Introduction

China’s economy is the fastest growing in the world. Official Chinese government figures, from the National Bureau of Statistics, indicate that China’s economy grew 11.9 percent in 2007, the fastest rate of growth in more than a decade.[1] However, nearly thirty years of rapid economic growth coupled with a “pollute first, clean up later” mentality has devastated China’s environment.

As a nation of over 1.3 billion people, China faces some of the world’s greatest environmental challenges. Some 400 cities in China face severe water shortages,[2] and seventy percent of China’s rivers are polluted.[3] As one of the world’s largest green house gas (GHG) emitters, China was responsible for an estimated 6,200 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) in 2006 from fossil fuel combustion and cement production alone.[4] That represents a nine percent emissions increase over the previous year,[5] and is primarily due to the country’s reliance on coal as its main energy source.[6] As a result, pollution levels in Chinese cities often pose an enormous health risk to citizens. Because of China’s position as a developing nation with growing energy and resource needs, few nations have a more important role to play in making the urgent transition to sustainable development.

Building Energy Efficiency in China

Ruidong Jin and Fan Rui *

[ jump to end/comments ]
[ download PDF ]

I. Yesterday: Was Building Energy Efficiency Needed in China?

This was the question asked by Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) when we first entered China early in 1998. To our surprise, we found few people interested in energy efficient buildings. In contrast with the aggressive energy standards for buildings in the United States, few Chinese provisions expressly pertained to energy efficiency in its numerous building codes and standards. At that time, the whole country had only one national building standard dealing with energy savings, which covered only residential buildings in the northern zone and was poorly implemented in any case.[1]

The lack of concern about energy use was endemic, apparent not only in the building sector, but also in most of China’s industrial sectors. The only good news was that a few innovators within the Ministry of Construction were able to create and promote a few efficient building pilot projects in Beijing and Tianjin, but none of these projects were successful enough to bring policy makers’ and the public’s attention to the need for energy efficient buildings.[2]

Consequently, our first question was answered rather quickly: China’s buildings were inefficient and little progress was being made to change this. From here, we began to ask another question: how can we develop sufficient support in China for building energy efficiency programs?

Enhancing China’s Environmental Governance: Challenges and Opportunities

Fuqiang Yang and Min Hu *

[ jump to end/comments ]
[ download PDF ]

Introduction

China’s economic and social development has had severe environmental impacts: from land and water resource deterioration to becoming the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, pollution has resulted in total losses equivalent to 3.05 percent of China’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP).[1]

Under a strategic plan to pursue a sustainable development path, China has passed a plethora of environmental laws, standards, and regulations in recent years, and adopted ambitious targets aiming at reducing major pollutants by ten percent and improving GDP energy efficiency by twenty percent in its Eleventh Five Year Plan (2006-2010).[2] These ambitious goals were set despite clear evidence that China’s environmental governance system has struggled with enforcement, especially at the local level. Due to a lack of enforcement, less than one percent of China’s urban residents live in cities that meet World Health Organization air quality standards.[3] Failure to enforce environmental regulations has also contributed to rapid motorization and the growth of polluting and energy-intensive industries, undermining GHG mitigation achievements made in other countries of the world.

A breakthrough in dealing with the problems of China’s high speed growth occurred in March 2008. In recognition of the economic and humanitarian need to improve environmental governance, the National People’s Congress upgraded the vice-cabinet level State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA) to the cabinet level Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP).[4] This promotion establishes a basis for building environmental governance capacity through increasing staffing and budgets; increases attention paid to environmental and energy policy integration at all levels of government; and continues efforts to internalize the economic impacts on human health and environmental externalities caused by traditional fuels combustion. This paper discusses institutions which are responsible for environmental governance in China and opportunities to restructure these institutions to integrate environmental concerns into China’s national policy-making process and increase enforcement and compliance.